Cave Man: Werner Herzog Can't Get Out of His Own Way in Forgotten Dreams

One of the few justifiable recent excursions into 3-D, Werner Herzogs Cave of Forgotten Dreams documents a secret wonder of the world, the Chauvet cavea subterranean gallery of 300 animal images discovered in 1994 in the South of France.

Twice as old as the paintings at Lascaux, yet amazingly fresh and frankly mind-blowing in their depiction of lions, mammoths, and rhinos, the Chauvet images were made 30,000 years ago, at the dawn of human time. Herzog wangled entrance to this ultra-exclusive treasure, off-limits to all but a handful of scientists, for which we may be grateful; his movie, however, is anything but humble. On one hand, the artist identifies with his Cro-Magnon peers, suggesting their paintings, some depicting animals with eight legs, are proto-cinema; on the other, he looks for contemporary kindred spirits, populating the movie with as many eccentrics as he can excavatea local parfumeur with plans for an aromarama Chauvet theme park, a guy who toots The Star-Spangled Banner on a Paleolithic flute. Herzog also discovers a dreadful future to match the unknowable past: a nearby nuclear facility that has generated a tropical biosphere populated by mutant albino crocodiles.

Herzogs 3-D is often masterful in representing the way in which the paintings shaped surfaces enhance perspective, or in revealing how deep space might be defined by light. (For better or worse, the movie does for Chauvet what Baudrillard complained an on-site replica did for Lascauxrender the real thing false.) Would that the director maintained the caves silence, deep enough to hear your heartbeat. Instead, theres a compulsion to fill the void with philosophical vapors (Is this the origin of the soul?) and Ernst Reijsegers obtrusive New Age choral music. The escalating audio desecration is capped by the filmmakers ultimate head-scratcher. Perhaps the mutant crocs will swim to Chauvet: Looking at the paintingswhat will they make of them?